


but don't remind me of home, in case it isn't quite the same

by aosc



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Multi, OT3, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-10 22:30:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5603305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's never been anybody there to tell her that the mirroring starbursts climbing down her shoulder blades are atypical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. apocalypse dreams

* * *

 

She first sees them when she catches her own reflection in the dull shine of the dented, high-polish door lock in the AT-AT's still mostly remaining crawlspace tunnel. Beneath the sand and the grime she's quite pale; the knobs of her spine jut out ghostly from the center of her back, and the fan of her shoulder blades isn't scarred or dusted tan, so they stand out, a starch contrast. She attempts to scrub at them once she's finished studying them, wobbly in the reflection; twisting about herself as much as she can. She rubs at the skin until it's reddish and raw, imagining that they pale and fade out with each scratch of her nails.

 

None of the dark dots come off, even a little.

 

Rey hasn't developed the habit of looking at her shoulder, rather, mostly over it, but she supposes that if they don't come off, they've probably always been there. She eventually stops trying, and ceases to think of it. In the larger span of life, it is not as though she should care about them. She cares about the roiling hunger in her stomach. About the unsteadiness in her knees, if she goes days without being able to trade for rations.

 

*

 

Still, she feels, somewhere deep in her, that she should care. That the flicker of -- _something --_ that she gets, when she traces them, should mean something. That when she sits, curled into herself, in the belly of the AT-AT, turning right and left around the jut of her ribs to be able to touch them, that they should mean _something_. _Something_ is what has kept her sane. _Something_ isn't _nothing_.

 

But she also knows that on Jakku, on its own, that will never be enough.

 

*

 

She has barely visited Niima's medcenter, run down and privatized by what's left of the Empire's rule, since credits are rare to come by, and that's what it takes to be admitted. It's only natural that she learns how to dress wounds, cauterize cuts, and set fractures on her own.

 

She thinks that perhaps there, if anywhere, she would've been able to find some information on what the marks are.

 

Instead, there is an old Twi'lek woman down in one of the smaller local cantinas, who scrutinizes her, head to toe, who is the one to tell her.

 

Rey dislikes the lurch of alcohol, the lightness of her feet when she drinks, but she orders two fingers of Corellian whisky -- the bad brew -- on one evening, when she's drawn close to having been swallowed by a desert storm. She finds an empty booth at the far back of the cantina, leaning into the wall and recounting the week's finds. The bare minimum, is what she's managed. The hunger is firmly there, in place, drawing her gut out, stringent and empty.

 

"Do you have a seat to spare, scavenger?"

 

Rey looks up from the amber swirl of the whisky, wary, since she hadn't noticed someone approaching. The Twi'lek inclines her head with grace. Rey's never met one of her species before, knows that the ones who travel outside of Ryloth are few, and they come far in-between. She's not one to question, though; Jakku asks no questions. There is life, and there is death. The void in the midst doesn't care to know why, or who. She eventually nods.

 

The Twi'lek sits, a cup of wine put before her. She does nothing to indicate that she wants to talk, so Rey worries her own glass, and tries to breathe through the burn of the liquor at the back of her throat when she sips carefully at it. The bad brew is the _bad_ brew, but for a moment, before it turns her dull and reaching, it sharpens her; gives the bustling room an edge.

 

Rey notices the spatter of white spots in the juncture between the Twi'lek's thumb and index finger; a burst of stars on the pale blue of her skin, only because she keeps her gaze firmly cast down, away from what might become an issue, should she look the wrong scrapper in the eye. She doesn't mean to stare, but it reminds her of the marks. Hers are dark, and not quite as shapely, but there is something that says that they are the same thing, in essence.

 

"Your first time seeing someone else's mark, is it?" The Twi'lek says, her words clipped, a starch contrast to the rolling accent of the spoken branches of Twi'leki. Rey startles, but when she looks up, careful, from where she's been staring across the sandy floor, the other's face is not unkind.

 

"Everyone has them?" Rey asks, frowning. She thinks of her own two, mirroring, constellations.

 

The Twi'lek nods. "They are the brand of your soul, unique to yourself and the soul entwined with yours." She says, but with the intonation of something bland; as though it's common knowledge, passed down from mother to child. Perhaps it is, as well -- but Rey wouldn't know, she notes, the knowledge of that tangy and sour in her mouth.

 

She's already waiting for the return of a parent, twisting around from the retreating back that she sometimes restlessly dreams of. A soulmate doesn't particularly fit into her already unsure equation.

 

*

 

She worries about it for a few days. She climbs through the tunnel and down into the body of the AT-AT to find a reflective more reliable than the tinny surface of its neck. The depths of the body are murky and dark, and when she brings her head lamp, the light bounces off the durasteel plates, and she is left with a light flare that leaves black spots in her field of vision, not a mirror replica of herself.

 

She reaches back and traces them, thinking each time she has done so that they should be elevated like scars; rough and real to the touch. A physical brand. Instead they are as though painted on -- just another integral part of the skin on her back.

 

 _A brand of the soul, unique to yourself and to the soul entwined with yours_. Rey barely understands what it means. It sounds grand. Something to be revered. But ultimately something you could search for until you killed yourself for it. The galaxy is vast, impossibly deep and expansively populated. Rey is rooted into one place, scarring the walls with her numbered days, waiting for a parental figure endlessly; she couldn't search the Rims for a soulmate. She can't leave.

 

She likes to imagine it, though; building scenarios keeps her awake at night, but it fills her with something that has been previously distinctly absent. She imagines it is what hope feels like. She isn't alone. Somewhere, outside of Jakku's iridescent orbit, there is someone with a mirroring two swirls that is _hers_.

 

It makes her stomach ache; something pulling, tugging, even past the hunger, even past the weariness. She is not alone.

 

*

 

She starts seeing them, consciously searching them out, and sometimes remembering them, unconsciously having taken note of them, when she's in Niima. Large, planetary dots; lines, a crackle of lightning. Some look alike, other vastly differentiate. She sees them on throats, and hands, and legs. Some, she can't see, so she draws conclusions. Realizing that all sentients has one, that literally anyone, could be hers, is a little overwhelming.

 

Though, the fact that even Unkar Plutt is someone's soulmate makes her grimace.

 

She hangs onto the thin, frail stringent of hope that she's managed to salvage, but it isn't much.

 

*

 

When Finn and BB-8 come along, she's suddenly torn. Jakku beckons her back. She can't leave. And at the same time -- there are entire galaxies at her feet, with its milky swirls in the distance, and with solars brimming with light flashing past as she pilots the _Millennium Falcon_ out of Jakku's orbit. Her stomach lurches, but she can't afford to be afraid. She hasn't ever had the luxury of knowing fear. It is too intimate, and some day, your fears will kill you. So she quenches all of hers.

 

She's a scrapper, a scavenger. And there are entire galaxies for her to discover. Out there, there are solar systems she has never heard of -- and in one of them, there is someone with dark swirls on their skin, mirroring hers.

 

She's absolutely, positively sure, that there is no greater good waiting for them out there. But the Resistance -- _the light_ , that they will whisper of in the cantinas, it is a tangible thing. And Han, he's worn, and he has a way of making the words lilt off of his tongue in a fashion that proves he thinks he can fool people into thinking he doesn't give a kriff about what happens to the galaxy. But Rey is also positively sure of that he is _good_.

 

Han has spiderwebs of scars winding down his arms, and in the crook of his left elbow, he has a darkening explosion of a mark.

 

"Did you find your match?" she asks, though she's not supposed to know -- but if there ever was a father who isn't her own, but someone who could, at least momentarily, be, then he is -- and she _wants_ _to_ _know_. No one she has ever come across has a match. They are still searching. Or, perhaps, they've even given up searching altogether.

 

Somehow, you just know. It can be anything, of course, but sometimes, she will catch herself staring at someone who's mark is visible, but barely there. The soul, a watered down, surviving thing. Given up waiting for someone who might never come.

 

Han looks up, one eyebrow coyly raised. Rey flushes. "I didn't mean -- " she starts, and clears her throat into a rushed "I'm sorry," but he waves her off. "'S fine," he says, "No one asks, is usually what. You just don't."

 

Rey nods. "I understand," she says, and reclines stiffly into the co-seat. Hyperspace is soothing, a blur of light and time. She twists the muslin wrappings of her hands, matted and dirty from oil and soot. She should get them cleaned up and hung to dry, not waste time, asking too intimately personal questions of a weathered war veteran who has, for all intents and purposes, never given her the barest inclination towards that he _might_ be interested in what she has to say.

 

"Kid," he murmurs, snapping Rey back to attention, "Just 'cause you find them, don't mean you can't lose 'em again. Remember that. It ain't all that's good in life."

 

Of course, she hasn't ever thought as far as that. She elects not to ask again.

 

*

 

She will see, much later, when it's entirely too late, and her head rings with Han's words, that General Organa has an exact replica of his mark, just below her breastbone. The ache in Rey intensifies. She doesn't know if it will ever stop. It engulfs her, paralyzing her below the waist, tugs at her.

 

She vows that if -- _if_ , she finds hers, she will stop at nothing to protect them.

 

*

 

Finn embraces her there on _Starkiller Base_ , the hard planes of him hanging onto her much thinner frame as though he's afraid he'll never see her again, should he let go. He's perhaps not wrong, Rey thinks, and sighs into the side of his neck, allowing herself the width of this stretch of seconds to just breathe into the leather of his jacket, and close her eyes against the death and destruction that is being fed to her through the still raw, agitated opening in her mind. A saber wound, cauterized, but agonizing.

 

Kylo Ren left something behind in her, and in truth, she is afraid of what it might do to her.

 

"We came back for _you_ ," Finn murmurs, and pushes her close, close, to his chest. He never gave up on her, she knows that on the bare conviction in his voice alone.

 

" _Thank you,_ " she replies, and balls her hands up into white knuckled fists at his back.

 

She _will_ come back for him, too. She _cannot_ give up. She quenches her fears.

 

*

 

Kylo Ren leaves something behind for her.

 

Had the jagged blade of his saber cut two centimeters to the left, it would've gone cleanly through the middle of the entirety of Finn's thoracic spine. And when Rey comes down from the rush of epinephrine and _Force_ , then she feels it. Like she just knows. Nobody ever told her about this feeling -- but it washes over her, squalling, a phantom pain, spearing through her back. Kylo Ren has left a cauterized saber wound in her mind, and the Force has found its way there. Through it, she feels _everything_. She feels _Finn_ , and something stirs in her.

 

The med-droid on-base exerts Finn out of the tattered remains of his jacket whilst he's put under. The skin on his back shifts, and Rey sees that he's so unnaturally pale that it's a miracle he's survived this far. The jacket is drenched in the wet of the snow, and Finn's lips are blue, his nails likewise. Where embers have melted on his skin, he has small burns. They litter his shoulder, as the droid cuts the cloth. Rey's breath catches, lodging in her throat.

 

His marks are a pale white. Almost like dots of pearls on his skin, where they swirl into constellations on his shoulder blades. One is partly smudged with cauterized flesh, and Rey feels sick -- but she also knows now. Knows, that she has found _him_ , someone who is _hers_ \-- and that the weak beat of his heart is what she will fight to keep. She will fight to keep the mirror of her soul, right there, breathing weakly into the tracheal tube the droid is attaching to run out of the corner of his mouth.

 

"He'll be okay, won't he?" She says, terse, jaw clenched against the tears and the fatigue threatening to overwhelm her. The droid buzzes around Finn, but it does not respond. She grinds her teeth, and draws one, two, shuddering breaths.

 

"He'll be okay," she insists. He never gave up on her, she won't do him the disrespect of not returning the favor.

 

The surgical droids swirl into the room not a minute later, and one of them beeps angrily at her. A doctor follows suit, the flaps of her coat and the commanding square of her shoulders giving away her rank. Rey quickly wipes at her face, and stands up. The doctor looks at her as though she's merely surprised that she's still able to stand up, less that she's present. Rey would agree.

 

"Rey," the doctor says, gently, "Your friend is just being prepared for surgery. You can't be in here when the procedure gets underway, I'm afraid."

 

Rey nods. "He'll be okay," she says, again, though she's not entirely sure who she is talking to. The doctor smiles, just a bare quirk of half her mouth. "Of course," she says, and waves for a small droid to usher Rey out of the room.

 

Rey feels his heart, reverberating, weak, but there, through her. She doesn't know how it works, just that it does. It's a flutter of a pulse that gets weaker the more distance she puts between them, as she's guided out of medbay, and towards the main wing, but it stays with her.

 

She thinks of General Organa, and her mark, and that Rey's match was right _there_ with her. And she didn't realize, or think to look.

 

She thinks of Han, _just 'cause you find them, don't mean you can't lose 'em again_.

 

*

 

She allows herself four hours of sleep, and wakes before the veil of stars has even begun to lift over D'Qar. There is no word on Finn, so she dresses, and heads over to medbay again. She's slept in the _Falcon_ , not comfortable with being on-base, which bustles with militia. With war. The belly of a machine, Rey can handle.

 

Medical is lit with pale fluorescent light, a few droids buzz around, and she even notes a few humanoid medics hurry down the corridors. Ultimately though, it mostly hums with machinery, not with the jostle of people and activity. It's good, it means they haven't taken much damage. It means that there are less potential deaths to worry about, less good soldiers -- good men and women, who have fought to the cost of their lives.

 

But Rey gets restless. There is no word on Finn, and it is innately quiet.

 

"You Rey?"

 

She startles, reaching for her saber, clasped at her hip, and twists around the unmanned info desk.

 

It's a pilot, slouched against the wall just beside the firmly shut doors to ICU. His bright shock of orange flightsuit is what makes her partially relax, slowly let the curl of her palm slide from her saber again. It's just become a habit, coming to her as a natural tug of undercurrent.

 

"That would depend on who is asking," she replies, because nobody should know her -- she _is_ nobody. But she also realizes that there are bruises beneath his eyes, and a restless tick to his foot, and that he isn't here for the joy of it. He is here because of someone, and that someone is not her. Her paranoia is a product of the base need to survive, but right now, it's not her that needs to survive. She concedes. "I'm Rey. Who're you?"

 

"I'm grateful that you brought Finn back," he says, not directly answering her question. She frowns, about to protest -- tell me, your name, when she thinks of Finn. _I'm a stormtrooper_. _I'm a deserter_. There is the one person that Finn mentioned to her back on Jakku, wearing his jacket, running wide eyed from wreckage and death.

 

"You're Poe Dameron," she says, finally putting a face, and a lilting voice, to the name of BB-8's master. The pilot inclines his head just barely, the gesture small enough to miss.

 

"I'm grateful you brought Finn back," he repeats. "But yeah. I'd say it's a pleasure, but -- "

 

"Yeah," Rey finishes, and sits down on one of the chairs in the corridor. She exhales. Breathes through her ribs winding up, attempts to sink into some semblance of calm. "He'll be okay," she says, again. She can't not believe in him.

 

"Yeah. Yeah, he will," Poe replies.

 

*

 

Doctor Kalonia tells her first, during a routine checkup. "He's a true soldier, your friend," she says, and beckons for Rey to remove her shirt. She smiles. "He'll make it."

 

Rey breathes out in what feels like the first time in days. As though she regresses just a little bit, becoming a little less brittle with wear. She pulls her top over her head, and waits while the doctor listens to her lungs, and pushes in the stairs of her ribcage, pinching in the low of her back and checks her heart. She says nothing, but draws up in front of Rey when they're done with a face which betrays her professional curiosity.

 

"You have twin marks," she notes.

 

Rey pulls her shirt on again. "Always had them," she says, and twists around to face the doctor. "Why?"

 

Kalonia shakes her head. "I apologize for being a little tactless. The soul mark is a private affair," she says, "It's just incredibly unusual to have two soul bonds. Most of us have one, and even the one can be very difficult to locate. You have to be very lucky."

 

Rey freezes. "Two?" she repeats.

 

Doctor Kalonia nods, "You didn't know?"

 

There's never been anybody there to tell her that the mirroring starbursts climbing down her shoulder blades are atypical, no. There's never been anybody there able to tell her _anything_ , actually. She thinks of the Twi'lek woman, telling her of an axiom of life. As simple as that.

 

There are no givens for Rey. Truth is, there is only right now. She's never had things to last through time.

 

*

 

She's never had things to last the span of time. So Rey doesn't tell Finn. She presses a chapped kiss to his forehead, and leaves it there. She feels his heart reverberate, and she gets warm with the ache of having him there. But she also knows, that she must finish this. The Force squalls in her mind, pulling her along, and when the map shows an actual location, the island is tangible and lush with green and full of nimbus, and Poe looks at her with something resembling hope cracking open across his face --

 

It beckons. She is a scavenger, a scrapper, and there are galaxies for her to discover. A trill of raw, untethered power within her, that she has to dig her fingers into. To break apart. To know.

 

She meets Poe in the corridor, crossing from medbay into the hangar. He's wearing Finn's patched up jacket like it's a necessity on his person, like it's life support. The dark circles beneath his eyes are yellowing, bruises fading, but she knows that they're consciously switching as Finn's guard. That there is something that tugs on him, too, and that Rey cannot quite figure out how he fits into the equation. She keeps _the second_ at the back of her mind, because the possibility alone is so small, its existence is bordering on ridiculous.

 

Rey hasn't had things which last. Neither of them have. Perhaps that's why they're instantly taking to each other. Moths to a fire, desperate for the diffuse, warm glow.

 

"It's time?" Poe asks.

 

Rey nods. "I have to," she says. Says it in the hope that _he_  understands that she has to, though they barely know each other. Poe hums. Something halfway there slants his face. "I know," he replies, "You come back to us though, alright?"

 

"I promise," Rey says, and she does -- promise. He holds out a rough hand for her to take. It's a mechanic's hand. She feels it slot into hers, larger, but naturally so. A steady grip, secure in going from point to point. Something hooks loose in her stomach, an ache resolving, mellowing out. She will come back -- for _them_. Plural.

 


	2. of what's to come

* * *

 

Ahch-To's main island is rocky and sloping, barren the further Rey treks up the path winding around its mountainside. The salt wind tugs at her hair, and an ocean roars and squalls beneath her feet. In a way, it's innately alive. Wet, and more humid than D'Qar, but possessing the same wild edge. She barely hears Chewie and the _Falcon_ take off for the wind, savage in a way she doesn't know. She knows lightning storms and the crackle whip of sand, not this unpopulated rock in the midst of a pool of ocean. It's untamed, but untamed in a way that makes Rey want to drink it all in, hungry for the tower of the forest, the crown of the mountain.

 

She thinks of Finn, wrapped up in white and comatose. Of Poe Dameron - the hover of his back at Finn's bed, and the brush of their shoulders in the mouth of Finn's room. She thinks of Kylo Ren, and of the Dark Side. Palpable now when she knows how it feels. A figure void of shape and form, is a push of raw, black power.

 

She knows that if she allows it, it could consume her; worm into the places in her heart that are sickly empty, that are a little like the badlands and sink holes on Jakku.

 

But she won't give up.

 

Rey reaches the peak of descending, and stands there for just a moment, feeling the push and the pull of the planet. The ocean is so blue, and only a few clouds litter the far sky. She looks around, seeing rounded peaks of small cots, ridged with the coarse stone. They're all around her. It startles her to think that of course, this is it. She can feel it. If she closes her eyes to the wind and the salt, she senses it. A gentle push and pull of guidance.

 

 _He,_ is also there. She feels the Force beckon her forward, around the bend of the mountain top.

 

*

 

He is Master Luke, innately, and Rey doesn't question it.

 

"You know who I am," she says, into the wind. He looks at her - through her, perhaps, for a long time. He doesn't speak, and Rey doesn't feel the need to repeat herself. She holds the saber out, a divider. It's sealing the ground firmly between the two of them. He simply looks at it with blue eyes, crowded by crow's feet and age.

 

"I do," he says. He turns, half towards the back of the mountain, and barely inclines his head. Away from the pinpoint of the ridge. She follows.

 

*

 

He is an old soul. Older, than his sister, in the way that his back is slightly curved forward, and the flicker of his eye is slightly more wide, searching for shadows that Rey can't see are there. That won't be there - not to her scant knowledge, at least.

 

But when she follows him from the slope of the rock, down again, his gait is smooth, and when he steps into the maze of small mountainside huts, she sees pride let up the line of his shoulders. He is bent, and broken, but not destroyed.

 

He won't accept the saber from her. He won't tell her why.

 

"I was too old to be trained," Luke says. He's shown her into one of the huts overlooking the vast expanse of green down below. He turns to her, mouth twisted slightly sharp. "And, the truth is that you're about the same age now as I was then."

 

Rey twists the cup of tea between her palms. She has left her staff at the far end of the room, but the saber she keeps clipped to her hip. There is nothing around her that doesn't whisper softly about bygones in a language she doesn't speak, but is somehow able to understand. And if she closes her eyes, the feeling of her pushing forth into that particular pocket of space within her is slippery in her grasp. There, and gone. It's slowly crowding with something, filling up the pitted space.

 

Rey steels her jaw. "So that's it - I'm too old?"

 

Luke is silent for a few moments, his gaze growing distant. She wonders if he's looking at someone - someone that is foregone of this age. She's learning day by day that that's not wholly non plausible. 

 

Luke's mouth barely quirks, but Rey doesn't see that it's with joy. "Perhaps that is a good thing," he says.

 

*

 

Mission objective is to bring him home. But Rey remains on Ahch-To, too curious about what _she could do_ with his training, to talk to him about going with her and Chewie, when the time comes.

 

The village is scraps of stone whetted over time, the first Jedi Temple looming grand down the mountainside, a mouth in the stone that goes deeper than Rey can imagine. She hasn't ventured there, but hearing Master Luke tell her makes the small tendrils of the Force guiding her mind run together, form a river that dips into a memory that's not her own. He's a vibrant story teller, weaving her grand tales about The First Jedi, and the Sith Empire, the vastness of the wars that have brewed between the users of the Light, and the Dark, ever since. He brews her tea that makes her simultaneously numb and sharp, an edge of a knife encased in slabs of dirt, buried in the ground. She can feel it touch that space in her, but when she reaches out, it slips farther out of her grasp.

 

"A Jedi is not a warrior," Master Luke says, over one of their evening meals, "He is a keeper of peace."

 

For the life she's lead up to this, Rey thinks, there's hardly a difference to be made between peace keeping and ruling by the force of hand. 

 

Rey scales the mountain and runs miles, told to keep to the roads she can round the mountain's beak on. Master Luke never tells her which those are. Some days, she meditates from first light and until the warmth of the sun dissipates into a thick twilight. She moves objects with the Force whispering around her, gently lowering slabs of stone thousands of feet down into the ocean, never allowing them to plummet, until she shakes with fatigue and has to blink bursts of stars of migraine from the field of her vision. She always refuses to give in; she is _not_ weak.

 

She seldom leaves her cot without the saber clipped to her hip, but she never gets to use it.

 

Master Luke looks at her long, when she mentions it. Something flits across his face, the pale ghosts of past. She is usually never inclined to ask about them, but then and there, she wants to know _everything_.

 

So she crosses her arms and her balled up fists, emotions peaking without her knowing particularly why - and asks him about Han and Leia. About their son, and his training, and about his own father. " _Darth Vader,_ " Rey says, tasting it on her tongue, and looks at Luke without flinching.

 

Master Luke pauses in his writing. There's a small holojournal he keeps, which she rarely gets to see. He slowly puts it down between them. For a long time, he sits in absolute silence, the way Rey has not yet mastered how to do. She thinks he won't talk. She thinks that he will look for his entourage of whispering Force ghosts moving in the downcast sun, and rise; disappear into the bleak evening fogs.

 

"His name was Anakin Skywalker," Luke says.

 

*

 

"There was - is, a prophecy," Luke says.

 

Rey keeps the saber, which has begun to slowly fit the scoop of her palm. She understands why he doesn't want it back.

 

*

 

In the end, when she tells him of why she came, it becomes not about him, or General Organa - but of herself.

 

Her dreams have grown flittering and far in-between, but when she does dream, it is about the images she cannot get rid of. The picturing of the Jedi Temple, thrumming with old, old power. How she digs deep into the belly of the mountain, walks through vast halls and past sealed tombs. She dreams of the Dark. Of it filling in the blanks in her soul with a thick black, enveloping, digging into her marrow and drowning her, lungs filling with murky water. Of whispering walls and a great sarcophagus on a planet her mind supplies scenery to as Moraband.

 

She dreams of not giving in. Of Finn. The little dotted lines spiraling down his back, just like hers. She dreams of twin marks. Triple. Another, the broad of a back she doesn't know, pressed against the two of them. In the mornings, it's vague, never something she can recall.

 

"Master," she says, "I need to go back." Plain, because she does - _he's_ needed on D'Qar, not on this rock, however sacred she also feels that it is.

 

Luke gently inclines his wrist for her to come down from the peak on which she's balancing, the Force a slow steady pulse of bright energy around her. On days like these, she can multitask, allow her mind to wander whilst exercising control - on days like these, she imagines that there may be something to the long hours; the frustration. Like the muscles that have thickened her build and leaned her out, the Force doesn't slip her without her consent. So she allows herself to _think_  - of going back.

 

"I know," Luke says, like on that first day. And there is something in his gaze to suggest that it _is_ like that day.

 

There is a decision to be made.

 

*

 

Chewie growls a stringent of curses in Shyriiwook at Master Luke as they approach the _Falcon_. For a minute, Rey is afraid that there is something in them that is blaming him for Han - for everything that's happened since he went away. But Luke, after stalling for a second, looking the _Falcon_ over for the first time in what appears a long time, murmurs, "It's good to see you too, buddy," and boards. The Wookie huffs - not happily, but content, over his shoulder. Luke greets a frantically bleeping Artoo with the same soft, reminiscent tone, and walks about the ship with used eyes and a set of hands familiar with the rugged interior, drinking it all in in a position Rey feels unfamiliar on her mentor.

 

The Ileenium system is, even at hyper speed, far off. Not dead, unknown space-far off - but it takes them a good while to drop into the Sanbra sector, and that's non-accounting for jumping in and out of the Imperial-controlled hyperlanes weaving through the nearby systems, going around the Inner Rim and dipping past the Colonies as stealthily as possible. The _Falcon_ isn't exactly unknown to scouts.

 

Rey remains Chewie's co-pilot for the trip back, though she would've understood Master Luke's inclination to take the seat. She's never seen him pilot, but when she slumps down in the main hold next to Luke, who is shuffling a deck of Pazaak cards between the cybernetic metal of his right hand, and the gloved of his left, she can imagine the deftness of his fingers going about the machine, just like the legends have always told her.

 

"You're having trouble finding peace within yourself," Master Luke observes.

 

Rey hesitates. She's not entire sure she should be personal with him, that he is far off; a desolate place in the midst of still water. But they've shared a living space and each other's thoughts for the past few months. Luke is a Jedi Master, but, Rey sometimes has to remind herself; far too human to be considered untouchable.

 

"We're not protocol droids, it's impossible to just shut off and be _above it_ **,** like the Code says," Rey spits, blunt without necessarily trying to avoid it. Meditation comes to her easily, slipping into the stream of the universe, but she gets angry - loneliness is still a scab she picks at, and a fear of the dark, lonely wastelands of the spaceship graveyard's very farthest corners gnaws at her. She can't discard her emotions into a bottomless pit, and not expect them to crawl back up. She's not sure she wants to.

 

Luke deals her a hand without being prompted to do so. "Jedi are supposed to bring balance to the Force," he says, "It has less to do with discarding your feelings than to not let them fuel the decisions you make. Elevate your duty above your emotions, when the time comes."

 

"When we fought - he beat at his wounds. And when Han - but that's a quest for _power_. It's different." Rey says. She notices she's gripping her cards with white knuckles, bending them around her fingers. She looks up at her master. She imagines she is treading dangerous space, though from Luke's calm intonations and passé face, calm mind - it is always impossible to know.

 

"The Force isn't good or bad, it's a tool that can be channeled. Like a blaster, or your quarterstaff - most Dark Users quest for power, so naturally, The Force manifests itself at the base of that very target. We are keepers of balance; the Code demands of us that we do not desire. We strive for knowledge, we don't hunger for it." Master Luke draws a card out of the remaining deck, unfazed.

 

"And love?" _Love_ is alien on her tongue, unused and odd. But it's what she means, in rough streaks. It's what the marks _mean_. "The love of a parent, a friend, a soulmate - are Jedi not supposed to feel that?"

 

Luke looks up from his hand, and there is something lilting, half torn, on his face. "What we feel, and what we acknowledge, are very different," he says. "And despite notions - I was never officially trained. There's not much of the Code surviving in me."

 

Rey thinks of Anakin Skywalker, of the younger, war hero-version of Master Luke; not this chalked out version, bent beneath the hand of a prophecy she barely believes, always on the losing end. She thinks of still being able to change. 

 

*

 

General Organa wraps her arms around Master Luke's shoulders as though she intends to never let him go, as soon as they dock, emerging into the bright, bright sunlight on D'Qar. Rey doesn't think that it's all that far off.

 

*

 

Finn hugs her tightly, his fingers splaying on the back of her ribcage, as though _he_ intends to never let _her_ go. Rey allows herself to sink into it for a flicker of a moment, putting her palms on the back of his leather jacket. He eventually lets up and steps back, his smile a little tinted with embarrassment. "Are you okay?" he asks.

 

Rey cocks an eyebrow, " _You're_ asking me that - really?" she says, and studies his straight back; the straight, soldier line of his shoulders, never going to be able to be washed out, "What about you?"

 

"Getting there," Finn says, " - Thanks to you."

 

He holds out his hand for her to clasp. It feels sort of ceremonial. She looks between him and the loose curl of his palm, the lines and scars, before she accepts it. It's warm and dry, a little dusty with the chalk she knows the fighters and pilots use for weightlifting in the gym.

 

"You're welcome, 'trooper," she says. His smile is wide and white.

 

*

 

She's not quite sure of how she should bring it up. So she doesn't. He's there; close, training with her in the gym, hovering over her shoulder as she tears out the _Falcon's_ old, meched with-401 hyperdrive motivator to exchange it for an updated software. He's a constant presence in her life, and perhaps that's all it's meant for. She's - not content, she thinks, but life on-base is something entirely different than playing a waiting game; searching the expanse of the sky on Jakku every day for the freighter that's about the size of what she remembers from so long ago. She thinks that she might be happy like this.

 

*

 

Rey knows she dreams because she is trapped in the eyelet of a desert storm, the stretch of her body being pulled like thread through the eye by the wind. It howls, and tears, and whets at her blunt edges. Saws her elbows and smooths the panes of her face. Levels her chest and ribs and hips. In the midst of it, there's a whisper, a voice, dry and old as the galaxy itself.

 

She wakes up shivering with fever, able to wipe a sheen of sweat from her chest. Rey gets up, unclothed, pacing, still unused to the sinking, sinking into the soft mattress she's given in the belly of the bunkers the pilots sleep in, still unused to not hear the whining of the wind clattering and chiming on the bulk of her bolthole. She's not officially signed in to any wing, but she thinks it's where she belongs, among the mechanics and technicians, not amongst the Generals and Commanders.

 

There is a sheaf of mirror plexi propped up in the narrow corridor leading out of the room. Rey pads over, arms wrapped around herself on autopilot. She twists in the murky dark, catching a spear of moonlight on the half of her back visible. There is muscle cording beneath the skin now, instead of the pattern of ribs - a dip to her spine, instead of her vertebrae ridging, canted out of her.

 

The marks are still there, untouched, smoothly integrated into the fans of her shoulder blades. A spatter of stars. Her back is the galaxy, and she's such a small, small part of it.

 

 _Rey_ , says something solid, untouchable, in her mind. She's only just getting used to the gentle whispers, crowding the spaces that are always, always in the backends of her head.

 

She dresses.

 

*

 

The air on D'Qar is watery and still, moonlight wavering in the body of the lake that is the nearest to base. It's slightly cold, Rey realizes, in the black tunic and lithe trousers she's received as per standard dress code; her leg wrappers are discarded, neatly folded, next to her bed, and her wrists are unclothed. She's carrying the saber, always, the pads of her fingers resting on the coarse ridges on its hilt when she's not immediately thinking of it. 

 

She's found that when she can't sleep, waking before dawn, or in the middle of night, meditation comes soothingly to hear. To slip into the nuclear blind of the Force, the gentle purl of everything unfolding inside her mind - D'Qar, the slopes bounding downwards into canopies of forests, the lakes and the dozens of milling creatures on-planet. She stretches out until she is dizzy with vertigo, until she has to sink into herself again, come down with a gasp and realize that she's solid and cut in skin and bone.

 

There is an oily sheen coming from the side hangar, a lamp flickering where she knows the X-Wings are stored.

 

Poe Dameron looks up at her as though he knows she'll be coming, slanting in through the gap of the port. He's stretched out to reach up to the wing, elbows and forearms greased black, uniform half discarded and tied around his waist. Rey surveys his handiwork; the cording of cables droop from where he's screwed the hull plates apart on the nearest split wing. The power couplings are frayed raw. Rey sees where the damage incepts, and where Poe is twinning copper to thread into plastoid tubings. He drops the cables.

 

"Even Jedi can't be allowed to start their workday now - surely. Whatever it is you folks actually do," Poe says. He inclines his head left.

 

"Jedi know that twinning copper thread by hand is  _hell_ ," Rey replies, "I can't fathom why you would do it." Poe laughs.

 

"If you're not someone who does everything by hand you let me know, because then I'll have assumed some things wrong about you."

 

She ducks inside the hangar space. _The Black One_ is magnificent in the way that fighter ships are, sleek and lethal, especially so where this particular X-Wing's hull is vastly dark, as if the durasteel has been burnished, a dull sheen shifting beneath the light. It's lighter, slicker - she sees its improvements and personal touches spread through, so easily obscuring the handiwork of the old T-65 model she'd managed to dig up that one time in a corner of the graveyard.

 

"She's magificent," Rey murmurs, and runs a curious palm along the tip of the wing.

 

"Handles slightly better than a Corellian pre-war freighter," Poe says, slanting a smile.

 

Rey snorts. "If you got the chance to pilot her, Dameron, you'd switch in a nanosecond," she says.

 

Something passes over his face, a shadow that he swallows quickly, but Rey sees it clear enough. "It'd be an honor," he says, and says it as though it's almost quite an invitation. She nods.

 

*

 

" _Soresu_ is one of the most taught forms of saber combat. It was especially favored by an old friend of mine," says Master Luke, and settles into the stance, wide legs and still elbows, right hand tight on the hilt of his saber.

 

Rey mirrors the stance from where she's standing beside him, coming down with her knees comfortably bent, shoulders squared; the point of her still unactivated saber points to the far end of the hall. She's reminded of its weight, metaphysical more than physical, as the scores on the hilt scrapes against her palm. She measures her breaths, and reaches out for the Force, ever so slightly. A tendril of it reaches back, intwines with the passive question she's posed.

 

 _Soresu_ is a dance, from the moment they both ignite the sabers, twisting around to face each other and clash, to the last step, when Master Luke moves on, stepping gracefully as his usual stance doesn't particularly suggest, and sinks into _Shii-Cho_. The patterns of the forms are her slipping into warm water now, the Force whispering, her legs moving. She is never quite her own, just the power grid to all the tiny, frail snatches of energy the Force is feeding where it forms connections to her. She feels it move her throat, work her muscles, snap in her tendons when she switches from defense to striking, a starburst of embers raining, cooling.

 

She doesn't so much notice that they're being watched, as the knowledge slips into her receptive mind, settling there. When they're finished, Rey turns around to see Finn hovering in the doorway. She wipes her brow and clips the saber to her belt, smiling at him as he cautiously approaches.

 

"That was amazing," Finn balks, hands coming out as if to clasp at her, before he realizes better, and flails, caught up in not knowing quite what to do.

 

Something curls in Rey's stomach, pleasurably, as she follows him out.

 

*

 

Finn bows so deeply to Master Luke that he's on the verge of tipping over, bending only at the waist, back still ram straight. "It's an honor - Master Jedi," he says, reverent, as though he's not quite with them at the moment, for what's transpiring in the room.

 

Master Luke motions for him to stand. "Please," he says, not unkind, "You have no reason to be bow to me, and little reason to call me your master. That is a call for old days."

 

Finn straightens. His fingers twitch towards his hips, Rey notes, a habit he seems to have a hard time shaking. There is no holster strapped to his waist now, no utility belt there. She stands to Master Luke's left, holding her tongue, wisely choosing to be silent. This is not her fight - not her beckon to quieten the nervous tick of Finn's palms.

 

Master Luke tilts his head. "It's a misconception that there was to be only one awakening, it seems," he says.

 

Rey reaches out to the flitter of Finn's mind, in motion, and lays a steadying finger at the edge of his conscious. The Force hums, a deep thrum within her, resounding. Finn looks at her, twisting only slightly from where he's facing Master Luke. She nods. He mirrors it, rapidly breaking into a wavering smile.

 

*

 

Chewie isn't incredibly happy about General Organa assigning Poe as Rey's co-pilot, much less that their mission is scouting the Trax Sector, venturing into the core of Hutt Space. He towers up in front of Poe, who has the decency and fostering to run pale and silent. Rey, who has by now become more or less familiar with the Wookie's jaw breaking soft side and fierce protective streak, buffers at his side. "He's the best pilot we've got," she says, her Shyriiwook coming out weak and strangled, but - she thinks - fathomable.

 

"Only Han - " Chewie begins, but silences, the yawn of growls dying in his throat. He nods, looking down at Rey with finality, and stomps off.

 

Poe looks at her with steel in the set of his mouth. "I won't - " he strokes a hand over The _Falcon's_ battered hull, "There was no better pilot," he says.

 

Rey sees Han's pained smile before her. The burst of stars in the crook of his elbow. "He was a good man, too," she says.

 

*

 

Poe tells her of the twist of a twig his ma had planted in their backyard on Yavin 4, the shadow Luke Skywalker left behind in the form of a little crooked sprout. "She'd never touch it," he explains, leaned into the co-pilot's seat, "It didn't need water, or nurturing. Either it sprouted, or it didn't. You couldn't control it. Ma'd take me out to it sometimes, when she was home - said to me _"Poe, this is hope, there's no one thing such as this little sapling,"_ "

 

They're parked just on the down beneath the Gamor Run, about to head back, but pausing for the moment. There's nothing out here, but remnants of what it used to be. Hutt Space is still largely controlled by the Huttese, but the stations they've passed, the tapcafs and seedy cantinas they've pitted stops in, they're pale, shoddy. It's not the darkly illuminated spaces she knows from whispers, and tales of days gone.

 

Rey stretches out from where she's been doubled on the floor, sunken deep in half-meditation. She pops her neck, and looks up at Poe. The upper body of his flightsuit is tied around his waist, something she's noticed he does.

 

"It's a good thing it could be saved," Rey says. She sees it before her, illuminated in the pale gold of dawn, a single leaf sprouting from a half formed twig. Perhaps that is hope. Or was - the concept of what hope was for the old Alliance To Restore The Republic. It's addled and muddled with now, she thinks, never quite sure what to perceive as hope. The blue of the ocean around Ahch-To, and the ancient whispers of the languages that precedes Basic - all things she sees in pictures because nothing spoken or any written Aurebesh could ever convey it.

 

 "You think this is your calling?" Poe asks.

 

Does she? Rey feels the Force deep as an undercurrent in her mind, the sumptuous feeling of it enveloping her, the stroke of it. She thinks that perhaps the Jedi Order of old wasn't ever a beckoning she could answer to, but that Master Luke teaches her to harness something that could draw her up against the large, ominous black that sometimes threatens to plunge into the dam of her meditative mind at sleep. Something that she can hold, close to her sternum, and use, to protect these people who've come to her and _stayed_ with her.

 

"Do you?" Rey says.

 

"Absolutely," Poe says.

 

*

 

Perhaps it was only a matter of time. They make a good team, Poe's familiarity with where to cross and not, Rey handling The _Falcon_ up and beneath most known routes to bypass scouts and curious smugglers who might or might not look to be tipped for intel.

 

But First Order-shuttles are positively crawling around every named hyperlane out around the bend of the Inner Rim. They've been going a little too close for comfort, crossing the spaces, but nothing indicates that a large, looming homebuild of something that resembles an old _Alpha_ -class V-wing, with a durasteel mold of something newer, will just pop up when they slow from lightspeed on the lip of the Hythrope Sector. Rey scrunches her nose and veers, glancing at Poe, who steels his jaw, and relinquishes the _Falcon's_ controls to her. "Never actually handled the blasters on one of these before," he warns, stopping at the corner of the cockpit.

 

Rey thinks of Finn. "Try not to be the first to open fire," she says.

 

Poe's lips draw into a tight smile. "Ma'am," he concedes.

 

The V-wing hybrid is hovering in the midst of the scanner, a blip of red far up ahead where Rey can make out its silver silhouette. She carefully edges out left, having hit the off for the thrusters, now barely inching forward at slow speed. She's opened their comm up, but isn't tapping into the general channel. They can't know whether it's an enemy ship, but the V-wing is an old Imperial design, and they're not supposed to be taking even _this_ chance. Much less the ones they've already done. Rey holds her breath, measuring each intake, each outlet.

 

Her mic screeches slightly as Poe adjusts his sourcing, frequency settling down to hers. "How's it looking up there?" he asks over the crackle of static.

 

"Like we should be able to maneuver ourselves out of this," she replies. It's reckless, but she's already done it once. The only - marginal - difference was that then Han did it with her. And she still doesn't know how to push the Falcon's buttons just long enough to make it without burning them out in the stratosphere of Vondarc, or crash straight into one of the actual First Order scouting parties surely parked by the Rimma Trade Route.

 

There's silence, and Poe's measured breathing.

 

The V-wing lurches forward in a hail of sickly blaster fire and speed. Rey is ready, sees where they will be before her motor skills catch up, a nanosecond later.

 

*

 

They're caught on the belly of the dead space between the access tunnel and the third cargo hold, a thin missile ripping into the hull dangerously close to the power converter. Their blasters are knocked out, and the plexi glass is dented where Poe is seated. He comes up to her again when they've jumped to light speed, temporarily out from under harm's cleaved tongue, and he's bleeding from where he looks to have whiplash knocked his eyebrow into the control panel. He smiles swimmingly.

 

"Acc belt's installed to accommodate someone of a slightly larger statue than mine," Poe explains.

 

Rey frowns, and unbuckles herself. "I'll get the med kit."

 

She cleans the wound with a disinfectant and cuts a small patch of bacta bandage to tape to Poe's forehead. It's a small stretch of broken skin, just across the slant of his eyebrow. Poe reaches up to swipe at his hair, wisps falling over the wound. She only looks because any movement in the vicinity of her vision catches her attention -

 

Across his wrist are three dots of starbursts, curving along the tendons, white against the tan of his skin. She freezes.

 

Rey thinks of Finn - of the knowledge settling deep in her gut, the stringent hunger satiated. She doesn't know how to - but at the same time, there is something now that threatens to well up through her lungs and sternum and mouth, climbing, a need.

 

"The mark," she says, blunt, the words coming anyway, "On your wrist - there's two."

 

Poe looks up, and whilst there's something half lidded in his eyes with pain, something sharpens, crackles. He nods, slowly. "People usually say it's a curse," he says, lip curling into not quite a smile.

 

"I have two," Rey says.

 

Poe stills. "You have - " he says, and then -

 

His face breaks into an ear splitting grin, and he reaches over to grab onto her shoulders, squeeze her biceps until the blood rushes from the skin, leaves pale white strips of flesh there. Rey's head swims, but she sees in the slight upturn of his wrists, two mirroring marks there.

 

*

 

Rey has rid herself of all fears, quenched thirst and whetted her hunger down with force until it is a lean, controlled thing. She has been torn apart by the desert, and molded by steel, sharpened by the backwater planes, contained by desert wasteland. She is a scavenger, a scrapper, and there is an ancient thrum of power growing, growing in her mind -

 

And then there is a pilot, and a soldier, and she is suddenly, achingly terrified.

 

She dreams, because it is what she does. They're barely on the verge of breaking into the Ileenium System, and she's finally catching some rest, eyes having gone dry and lined with sleep grit, mind falling exhausted into dreams with her fingers clutching the sheets. She sees the cauterized wound on Finn's back, situated so neatly - swiftly, next to Finn's spine. There is a void in her mind, and she imagines the dark. She imagines plunging, never managing to break out, reach for the light - 

 

There is a soldier, dressed in white plastoid armor, and there is _the_ soldier, dressed in white gauze. There is a pilot, and then there is _the_ soldier, still grinning, always, grinning, dressed in the orange of the Resistance, flanked by his sleek, black fighter.

 

Rey is caught in a desert storm, and she wonders whether it will soon come to drown her.

 

*

 

There is a pilot, and a soldier, and they're dragging her down the boarding ramp, enveloping her in the circumference of strong arms, no plating, no darkness, just -

 

She catches General Organa over someone's orange clad shoulder. There is something worrying on her face, breaking lightly. Rey ducks her face to bury in Finn's shoulder and _breathe_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, so this has turned into something way larger than i anticipated when i started off writing it. it should only be another chapter, though. and i won't be so slow. just, work's been way too much. so, yeah. but thank you, so much, to everyone who's left kudos, comments & love. it means so much, you couldn't possibly know ♥


	3. and must come to pass

* * *

 

"Master Jedi, your presence is requested by the General. She asks that you debrief your latest mission with Commander Dameron before the council at 1400 hours." The runner looks slightly awed by her - which, Rey is no one, there is no reason for someone to look at her like that. And by the old standards, she isn't close to being a Jedi - she's a youngling, barely a Padawan who just happens to have an affinity for harnessing her powers into something larger, a pale furnace nearing light. She colors slightly, but nods, not breaking the cross of her legs or the lowered line of her shoulders of what was her meditative slouch.

 

"Yes, I - thank you, I'll be there," Rey replies, slightly vexed by how to properly respond. The runner nods, curtsies, and spins on her heel, leaving Rey in the dojo.

 

She gets up, knowing herself well enough to feel that slipping into meditation again will be an exercise proven futile. She unwraps her wrists, and wipes her brow on the back of her hand. She'd managed 3 hours of relative peace, nothing disturbing her so much that she'd slipped out of the Force, the climbings of midichlorians and pale, watery atoms building, building until they become black like looming stars, bursting at the edges of her conscience.

 

She feels tiny wraps of the Force around several amasses of life forms spread out over base. It's not an exertion anymore to reach out and just - feel, accommodate her mind to slip into everything else that is always, constantly, in motion around her.

 

There is a soldier, and a pilot, and her - and they all share a map of stars, on their backs, on their wrists. 

 

*

 

It turns out they aren't going to be stripped in front of the entire council. Rey stands at attention when the General enters the room, but only Poe is flanking her. General Organa takes one look at her, rigid posture and eyes at the back end of the farthest wall, and waves her down with an ill kept grin breaking on her face.

 

"My brother has _not_ taught you that," she says.

 

Rey relaxes, only slightly. She stares at the General, who still smiles. "No, General, he has not," Rey carefully replies.

 

"Correct, dear," General Organa says, and stops by the circular control pad surrounding the holoprojector. She fixes them both with a look that is suddenly controlled, collected. "Now, if the two of you wouldn't mind - walk me through, what the _kriff_ you were thinking out there."

 

"General," Poe immediately cuts through where Rey is leaning into saying something - anything, "With all due respect - General, mission specs did not specify exactly what measures were to be taken to obtain the intel necessary for mission completion. It was a calculated decision that bottomed out."

 

General Organa frowns. " _A calculated decision -_ while you are technically right, _Commander -_  nothing explicitly stated you and your co-op were to _risk_ your _lives_ _gallivanting_ through Hutt Space, either. There was little to _zero_ necessity whilst on such a low-risk operation."

 

Poe swallows. Rey looks towards where his pulse is visibly beating on the bare of his throat. He doesn't say anything, but she imagines the words crowding his mouth, filling the space between the silent gnash of his teeth. It isn't a standoff, this is diplomatic - but in which a clear assertion of rank is currently made the point, little else.

 

"We breached a known, former stronghold of First Order sympathizers and revealed little to no current activity," Rey says, because this _was_  a mission debrief, not a fight. "Running so close to the Rimma Trade Route when doubling back for base was an active risk agreed between Commander Dameron and I, and whilst we did come under fire, the _Falcon's_ scanners picked up valuable intel on their shuttle. It's nothing we've seen before, which means they could have brokered new contracts with the KDY, or an affiliate." Rey pauses to breathe, notes how General Organa's interest has twisted to her now. The General indicates with a slow lap of her finger for Rey to continue. "If we manage to secure intelligence on a possible new trade agreement, that could lead to an opportunity to intercept the deliveries, if that comes to be."

 

The General says nothing for a few moments, looking torn between one expression and another. And then, "I won't say you remind me of me, because I still always knew how to behave around my superior statesmen and militia command - but I will say that I don't hate that you don't." She nods to Poe, "You're off the hook. The War Council will reconvene in a few days, then we'll decide how to go about this new information."

 

"General," Poe says, and inclines his head. Rey sees the soft tug of a smile on General Organa's mouth.

 

"In the meantime," she says, and eyes the both of them, "You've got some down time. Make the most of it."

 

*

 

Rey edges Poe outside of the convening, carefully, as though she's treading soft sand around the Sinking Fields. It's ridiculous, but - he's there, looking at her beneath a dark fan of eyelashes she's not supposed to know how to handle, and moving away as though she's something that will soon disappear.

 

Rey steels herself. She almost has - this, them, people in plural, and this is ridiculous, because she remembers General Organa, the faded mark sometimes glimpsed over the edge of her collar. Han, and the overwhelming sadness she feels sometimes through the Force, and knows the General's grief like a tangible, living organism. She knows that over the years, she's survived on the simple knowledge that today might be her last day. She has fought tooth and nail to keep to the wasteland she was dumped on - waiting for the turned back of a parent, leaving on the motty grey shape of a large freighter. She has taken, because she has been taken from, and this is going to be the single most precious thing -

 

Poe smiles, and holds out the flat of his palm. " _That -_ was probably more dangerous than running into the V-wing," he says, mouth slanted.

 

Rey breathes out the turmoil of emotions and tangles of thoughts, for now. She slips her hand into his, the gesture alien, but there is a twinge there, raw skin touch, that she knows that he feels. "The horror," she quips, "You could have been devoured whole, Dameron."

 

Poe grins, the edge slipping from his face, melting out. "Hey - " he says, and ducks a little bit, edging away from where they could go, "I don't - I'm not avoiding this. Whatever - _this_ \- is, I don't run from my battles."

 

"I don't, either." Rey says, consenting, mostly because there is no protocol for these things. What are they supposed to do? "I - we don't have to _do_ anything."

 

Poe nods. His face is still soft, still watching her, unwilling to slip. "Yeah," he says, "Right. We don't," He shrugs, inclining his head towards the end of the corridor where a slant of daylight spears through. "Just, if you want to - the mechs are gettin' everyone together tonight. Pilots, techs, the lot. Down time, and all that. I got Finn to promise to be there."

 

Rey smiles, a half beaten thing. "Down time," she repeats. "Okay."

 

*

 

Snap Wexley had the largest reserve of bad malt Rey realizes she's ever seen outside of a cantina.

 

The pilots had gathered in one of the side hangars, pushing craters heavy with plastoid spares and durasteel screws and bolts together to form a half crescent spot around a gather of lamps and a half cleaned box of malt flasks.

 

Jessica Pava has slung one arm around Poe's shoulders, that hand occupying a bottle, whilst her other draws loops and jagged stars in the void before him. She's talking animatedly, and Rey thinks that in the dull sheen, their faces are shadowed deep and dark, and they're beautiful. He - is beautiful. He reaches up to snap at her fingers, and the light bounces on the skin on his wrist -

 

"Hey."

 

Rey starts, where she's been perched on a far put crater, and twists around. Finn smiles at her, hands drawn apologetically before him. "Didn't mean to startle you."

 

She shakes her head, and scoots somewhat to the left. "It's fine."

 

"Are you - fine?" Finn asks.

 

Rey sidles a glance at him, eyebrow canting. "Me? Yeah, of course I'm fine."

 

Finn shrugs. "You looked a little - off," he explains. He's close, body temperature cool, shoulder knocking with hers. There is something taut, in her stomach, not hunger, not desire - just something. Something, which bottoms out in Finn bleeding out on Starkiller Base, a saber wound gouged through the fan of muscles in his back. In _him_ , bracketing her body to surmount the fear that grips him, vice like, before they depart the _Finalizer,_ so many things left behind on the shuttle, many things they won't regain.

 

"I'm fine," Rey repeats, mostly for the pretense of keeping - anything, up. "Down time," she says, as though that explains some things, and all things, that passes over her face when she doesn't tightly control it.

 

Something suddenly strokes tentatively, almost curiously, on the edge of her waking mind. Skittish, just there. She instinctively repels it, old wounds dredged up to the surface. She twists around to look at Finn, whose eyes are wide, dark, reflecting her. He leans forward.

 

"I'm so sorry - but, I just - you felt that, right? You felt _something_?" he says, low in the face of the rest of the gather of the crew chattering, but intent, insisting with a sharp edge to him. Rey nods. Her breath wells up in her mouth, almost tangible. "Yes," she says, fervently, and almost unconsciously - though she does it so very, _achingly_ , knowingly - reaches out to cover the bulk of his hand with hers.

 

*

 

Rey doesn't know how to plant suggestions without speaking, though Master Luke has suggested that it can be done - but Finn slips with her outside, just through the spear of opening of the port, as though he already knows she wants for him to come along. She's languidly letting a flask of malt cool in the curl of her palm, though she's not drunk more than half, not too enamored with the taste or its effects, but suddenly anxious to latch onto something contrasting.

 

D'Qar's largest moon stretches pale and illuminating on the above sky, hanging a little askew on the backdrop of stars. She's not quite sure what they're doing, but there is something pulling - that same thing that had prompted her to tell Poe about her marks.

 

They stop in the slight obscurity of a canopy of trees edging the airstrips. Finn's hands circle his hips, twitch at waist level. His gaze flickers to hers, then over her shoulder. Rey barely holds her breath.

 

"Is it the Force?" Finn asks, moving - towards her, into her space. Rey backs up slightly, body pivoting on autopilot, unused to it still.

 

"Is the Force what?" she says.

 

"This - " he halts, hands half moving, stopping, just before they're grasping for her arms. He ceases, and steps back, an animal unsure of where to tread, where to cross to best not get burned by misstep. He blows out a breath, frustrated. "This - look, okay, I'm kriffing _useless_ at this, I don't - _this_ _thing_. Tell me if I sound too crazy, because I think I might be going a little crazy."

 

Rey hesitates. "Do you know we're supposed to have soulmates?" she says, very, very carefully, because if this is not balancing on the knife's edge.

 

Finn stills. His hands slowly recede their furious, nervous tick, and he lowers them until they're limp at his sides. "I - no," he says, "That's not a part of the Imperial handbook. I mean - obviously I _know_ \- but, you know. That's for some very select, few lucky people. I'm a sto - a deserter." The part Finn doesn't say about _I'm not one of the few select who get to have_ an ending, Rey manages to hear anyway.

 

"Finn," Rey says, "You're a _hero_."

 

Something crashes, loudly, in the vicinity. There's some cursing in obscene Huttese, and then laughter, and the chiming of flasks and glass and people gathering. There is something peaceful over the base. Something warm, that is not in the air, humid from the constant spear of warmth and the close vicinity of D'Qar's largest sun breaking through the stratosphere. And Finn is leaning forward, slowly, slowly edging into her tightly wound personal space. She's letting him. Slowly. Her gut is drawn taught, the skin on her forearms breaking out into gooseflesh.

 

Something moves, a flash of sentient conscious across the airstrip. Finn twists around, and there are his hands close to his hips again. Rey steps into his space, laying a hand on the bare of his arm where his bodysuit has been tucked up above his wrists, almost unconsciously. He shivers beneath the pads of her fingers.

 

Something crackles, electric, a dry breath of something like the torrent preceding a lightning storm, and then -

 

Poe stumbles through the thick branches of the trees, seemingly unsteady so that he reaches out for something grounding - and closes his fingers tight on Finn's shoulder. He stops dead in his tracks. Rey feels it - _too_ , because they must feel it as well, because something passes, unearthing them, splaying that hunger in Rey raw, roots turned upwards. She shudders.

 

"Oh," Poe says. His eyes are dark, dark, and his mouth falls open.

 

*

 

Rey catalogues little things about them as they come - Poe's hands crowd her hips, and his mouth is cold from malt and warm from experience. She's bunching her fingers in Finn's bodysuit, pulling on the fabric stretching taught across his chest, whilst the other curls on Poe's right shoulder. He licks into her mouth, on her teeth, across her bottom lip, something frenzied in what he does and where he goes when he pulls away. He reaches towards Finn, who is already falling into the space between them, wide eyed, partially stiff, the line of his shoulders never quite relaxing.

 

Finn breathes short, stacked breaths through his nose, noises in the back of his throat, filling the silence up until it's brimming with keening. Rey draws a shuddering breath, and holds onto both of them, unsure of where she bottoms out here - where this goes.

 

Poe's quarters are larger than hers. They make it through the door, Poe shepherding them gently, a large palm each on both of them all through. Rey is pressed against Finn, unwilling to let her hands drift from where they are stroking over his shoulders, down over his back. Finn looks at her, half lidded eyes, his body a hard, warm line against hers.

 

"This is real?" he murmurs, grinding his thumbs into her waist.

 

Rey nods. "It's real," she says, and says it like a promise. "It's real."

 

Poe reaches for the both of them, muttering, " _Gods_ , you're gorgeous," between curving his palm over Finn's jaw, and lapping at Rey's collar bone. He pushes Rey gently down onto the bed, sheets of yesterday spilling down half onto the floor, with Finn following. He remains for a moment. The silhouette of his body towers, but there is something decidedly raw on his face, and he nods, to himself, to them. "There is nothing _as_ real, buddy," he murmurs, and kneels down, bracketing Rey's knees between his.

 

*

 

Poe sucks a bruise into her the dip of her hip. Rey reaches down to snap his wrist steady on her ribs, turns it up to reveal the mark to Finn. He's shirtless, rid of most clothing, a sheen of warmth to his skin, muscle shifting in his abdomen when he moves towards her with rapt attention. She's breathing shallowly, her body betraying her by convulsing, lungs constricting, whenever Poe moves. He spreads her legs with the hand he still has free, gently nudging until she's widely bracketing his upper body. Finn grips over the back of her hand, smudging his fingers over Poe's spatter of marks, and comes up to slot into her side, groan into her pulse.

 

"Did you know?" Finn asks, something hollow in his voice. A void. Rey thinks about voids, filling up with light, chasing shadows.

 

Poe licks into the crease at the innermost of her thigh. Rey arches against him, and pulls at Finn's waist, nails digging into his back. "Not for long," she replies, honestly. "Not us three."

 

She can feel the grind of Finn's thoughts, spinning, twisting, so she reaches against him, pulling him down by pressing his skull down towards her, and kisses him. Their teeth click, roughly, and Rey bites at his bottom lip. Finn keens against her mouth, breathing out and into her. Poe pulls blunt nails down her thigh. Rey breathes, one with them, something fitting together, a spear of moonlight illuminating them, and she thinks -

 

There are entire galaxies for her to discover. But there is a soldier, and a pilot, and her, and they share a swirl of stars on their backs, on their wrists. Her hunger warps, the set of teeth of loneliness that has gnawed at her, widened and shrunk her down and made her bottomless, eases into the press of Poe's tongue, the shortness of Finn's breath. She thinks that this is, perhaps, what home feels like.

 

*

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand it's done (for now, who am i kidding, i love soulmates). thank you, everyone, who's commented, faved, read. you're the real MVPs ♥


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